Philsopher Benjamin Bayer on “why the embryo is not an individual with rights”:
If abortion only involved aborting the growth of a tumor, most would be willing to admit that the fight to remove it could be admirable, even heroic, and so surely a choice protected by right. But the embryo is a different kind of growth. It represents a distinctive stage in the human life cycle, and this fact allows the Augustinian opponents of individual rights to sow confusion.
Even though there are differences between the tumor and the embryo, the burden of proof on the opponent of abortion is to show why the embryo is different from a tumor in such a way that gives it rights while the tumor obviously has none. I will argue that there’s no reason to think it is different in the respects that matter to the Enlightenment–American conception of individual rights.
Recalling Rand’s definition, a right “is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context.” This last part of the definition reflects the important fact (as we’ve seen) that the concept of “individual rights” was developed by political philosophers to help structure a society to protect rationality and industry from the threat of violence and thereby enable individuals’ pursuit of happiness.